While Lion's own name had drifted off the local radar screen in the past decade, he had an enduring influence on the cultural life of the region and the country. As a dedicated and resourceful producer of new plays, Lion created a climate for avant-garde theater that made the marginal seem essential. He staked out his turf and defended it with a tough-guy pugnaciousness in public and tender loyalties behind the scenes.

Today's struggling writers, storefront theaters and performance artists owe a debt to Lion. So does the Magic itself, which continues to carry the torch for new writers an astonishing 32 years later and counting.

"John's influence was absolutely seminal," said O'Keefe ("Shimmer," "Vid"). "He produced two of my plays when I was still a graduate student and sent me on my way as a playwright."

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"John was one of the creators of the not-for-profit theater in America," said the Magic's current artistic director, Larry Eilenberg. "He defined one end of the spectrum and delighted in thumbing his nose at mainstream society."

Lion made playgoing daring, hip and intellectually challenging at a time when the culture was opening up to new ideas. Drawn to the European absurdists, Lion, a Berkeley graduate student at the time, founded the Magic in a Berkeley barroom in 1967.

That was the same year the American Conservatory Theater moved from Pittsburgh to San Francisco. The Bay Area's new theatrical establishment and its major alternative arrived together, in what would prove to be a mutually enriching coincidence. Lion moved his company across the bay in the 1970s and took up permanent residence in its two Fort Mason theaters in 1977.

A BENT FOR EXPERIMENT

Like his contemporaries in New York's Wooster Group and Mabou Mines, Lion loved experiments in language and form. He produced the Beat poet Michael McClure, puppet artist Winston Tong and the austere performance art troupe Soon 3.

Most famously, Lion produced Shepard, then a Mill Valley writer in his pre-Hollywood years. "Buried Child," "True West" and "Fool for Love," among other works, premiered at the Magic. The company's Shepard casts included Ed Harris, Kathy Baker and Peter Coyote. While Lion was always firmly writer- centered, great writing begat great acting, directing and design work when the Magic was at its best.

The Shepard plays moved on to larger theaters, and so, eventually, did the writer, who stopped opening his works at the Magic in the early 1980s. A friend said yesterday that the break with Shepard was painful for Lion. And the Magic was never quite the same glamour address without its famous house playwright offering his new works there.

Even so, as the new writers thinned out or moved to other media in the 1980s, Lion mounted more and more established playwrights, even Eugene O'Neill. His support on the theater's board frayed, and Lion was forced to resign in 1990.

Then, in 1994, he picked up where he left off, taking a job directing the Kennedy Center's American College Theater Festival in Washington, D.C. The Kennedy Center's Susan Shaffer said Lion was devoted to nurturing young talent. He increased the festival's writing awards and added one for Latino playwrights. "He was a great champion of playwrights here," Shaffer said.

MOVE TO LOS ANGELES

Lion was due to begin a new job this week, as chairman of the theatre arts and dance department at California State University at Los Angeles.

He died of a heart attack, leaving behind a wife and four children younger than 12. The Magic is plan ning a memorial celebration of his life.

Amid the somber reactions yesterday, O'Keefe recalled a night when he, Lion and actor-writers David Schein and Bob Ernst slept on the Magic's Berkeley stage during a power struggle over control of the theater. O'Keefe, a wide-eyed newcomer from Iowa, asked about the future of the already famed Magic.

"You're looking at it," Lion said, and rolled over and went to sleep. To Lion, a theater was never a building. It was always people and the strange new plays they created together out of their heads.